you wouldn't need to decrypt a DVD to copy it; you could just copy the whole encrypted disk, including keys, which would kinda defeat the entire purpose of CSS.
That's what I already do, only perhaps without the keys. Just make an image of the disk with dd in Linux or Disk Utility on OS X, then tell vlc to play dvdnav:///path/to/movie.iso (or movie.cdr, for the mac folk). On Windows, it's not as easy to grab an image, so you can just open the DVD (right-click->explore) and copy all the files to a folder, then tell VLC to play dvdnav:///path/to/movie/dir/
If the pathnames are too long, pretend you're going to open a file, then open/path/to/movie/dir/VIDEO_TS/some_file, then knock VIDEO_TS off the path and make the beginning of it say "dvdnav://".
You lose a tiny bit of polish that way: VLC rarely gets the menus right, and usually just drops you at some random point in the menus. Also, you lose the ability to play it on ordinary DVD players, although I'm sure if I messed around with mencoder options, I could rip the raw video out, not even transcode it, just dump a single title into a new menu/image, and burn it (without CSS) to a stock 4 gig DVD.
But do you see now why they're trying to push Blu-Ray on us? DVD crypto is more broken than Bush's exit strategy.
The compelling reasons for me are package management, security (firewalls only get you so far), tweakability, and various little things I've gotten used to. The philosophy doesn't hurt, either. These probably do not work well for you, though.
Regarding webcomics: Sounds interesting, I have the same problem, but I hadn't solved it that way. Some webcomics have their own sort of bookmarks -- you can have them set a cookie so you return to that page. I've been bookmarking its homepage and coming back there, so I usually get the most recent comic, then if I haven't checked for awhile, I go back till I find my place. The nice thing about this approach was how "open in tabs" let me check all my webcomics at once, ctrl+w to go to the next one... But once it got to be around 20 or 30, that failed miserably, as it crashes the browser.
But I don't like RSS feeds anyway.
And anyway, someone (maybe me) really should do this extension, because IE is just a bad idea, no matter what your OS.
Regarding installing a small app for remote stuff: One way would be to carry what you need on a CD, another way would be a USB keychain. You could also boot off that USB keychain.
I know this probably doesn't help you at all, but my eventual solution to this problem is just to carry a laptop. It currently runs OS X, so my setup here is Firefox, Thunderbird+IMAP, Adium, TunnelBlick (OpenVPN), the built-in SSH, and if I really need it, Chicken of the VNC. It's also nice for ebooks, movies, and anime. But I can understand not wanting to spend the money -- although I find it very, very odd that my parents don't want to "lug" their Dells home, so they effectively become office desktops...
You could post this in Sumerian and find more readers than in Freespire's core market.
They aren't my target market, distro makers are. Read this:
Is there really such a legal difference between distributing ebuilds (which contain download URLs for the codecs) and distributing the codecs themselves in debs? Could debs include download URLs?
In other words, I realize there are other problems to using Gentoo, I'm just pointing out that Gentoo makes it (relatively) easy, but the more user-friendly Linux distros make it damn-near impossible.
You will not find an OEM or a big box retailer who will touch a distro that relies on gray market codecs for anything.
And Linspire violating the GPL is better how?
Besides, the Gentoo way of doing this could be duplicated elsewhere, even on an OEM -- force the user to click through some sort of agreement when they boot their computer, which will then download the codecs for them. If they don't click, they don't get the codecs.
I was suggesting that other distros that actually are friendly, like, say, Ubuntu, could take the same approach. I even said that.
Please, Coward, if you ever decide to troll about something again, have just the _slightest_ clue what you're talking about -- and actually reading my post would be nice, too.
an interface where you could 'change gears', so to speak, from 'beginner' to 'experienced' to 'advanced' to 'bloody-know-it-all'
It exists, but it's not as useful as you'd think. Try the Xine UI, go to preferences, they have settings from "Beginner" to "Master of the Known Universe". And I'm not making it up -- I mean, you actually hit a dropdown, and there is a "Master of the Known Universe" setting.
But once you figure out how to know what you know -- once you figure out how to know which settings you're safe changing, and what they do, and which ones to leave the hell alone -- it's usually easier to stay on "Master of the Known Universe".
What we really need is the kind of truly artful design which is immediately intuitive to beginners, without being limiting to experts. I've seen it done a couple of times...
Ok, stop with the "next" bullshit. This is only the easiest way to install a program because people are trained this way. The easiest way to install a program is to use a package manager -- and no, it doesn't have to be a commandline. It also does help with installing the 3 or 4 different apps, and finding the one that actually works, if you end up having to go through that -- for whatever reason, I don't often have this problem.
I would be very curious to see the results of this. My guesses:
Left entirely on their own, probably OS X beats Kubuntu by a hair.
With people coaching them, obviously it depends on the quality of the coaches, but I suspect it would be between Ubuntu, Gentoo, and OS X. Gentoo has by far the best community to help you, OS X is definitely the easiest to start with, but Ubuntu will probably be both easy to set up and easy to maintain -- OS X becomes a maintenance nightmare without a package manager.
If these people had previously used any computers -- if these were "computer newbies" who had used Windows -- then it'll be XP, but not by as much as you'd think. MS has a way of screwing up their interface, while other people actually improve the interface in other ways than making it like Windows. Besides, KDE and IceWM look quite a bit like Windows.
Or take a bunch of power users from various platforms, study them for awhile to figure out how much experience they had with each platform (how much time do they spend on one platform vs another), then force each of them to use another platform as their desktop OS, exclusively, for some very long time -- a few months or a year. This would probably show which OS is ultimately the most usable. My guess: inconclusive, really. Everyone will find a way to not only live with a given OS, but to thrive on it, and the only thing we'd be able to measure with any reasonable degree of accuracy would be the learning curve. But people don't switch OSes because of a learning curve.
But it would be very interesting, no matter what the results or how trustworthy they were. It would be especially nice if we could find some funding for this from somewhere other than Microsoft.
Unity and coherence smacks of Redmond-like "integration". I understand what you're saying, but I consider it a feature, not a bug, for my software to come from all sorts of different places, tied together by the distro. It means that all software on Linux is third-party, but all the third-party software in the distro is better integrated than anywhere else.
Now, I'm using OS X as a desktop BSD, so this may not reflect other BSDs, but:
I've found that third-party software on OS X doesn't necessarily integrate as well as native. Native software is managed by Software Update, all works together flawlessly, and so on. Third-party software, at least of the commandline sort, is hit or miss, compared with the flawless experience I've had with Linux.
Ubuntu seems to be about the right size for me, but if you really want a good-sized Linux install, you can start with a base Gentoo system or an Ubuntu-server install, then add packages to suit. My OS X didn't exactly come with a package management system to make it easy to add software to the base install.
Source-based is good, and I love Gentoo's ebuild system, but when I'm not creating/tweaking/hacking packages, I get really sick of waiting for every little thing to compile from source. Ubuntu is nice that way -- just download and install. There are other killer features keeping me tied to Gentoo, though, and OS X is certainly not source-based (Software Update is binary), so source-based isn't a deal-breaker for a BSD.
I'm much more familiar with Linux than I am with anything else, so my personal preference leans towards Linux. I'm not picking a fight either, just expressing some views. It does sound like you might like Gentoo, though.
See, I've always had all kinds of annoying little problems with BSD, as seen in OS X. The sound thing you mention is neat, except that sound frequently stops working in Firefox until you open Garage Band and close it, which, for no apparent reason, fixes the problem.
Commandline utilities generally work, but they're a lot pickier than Linux ones. For instance, I'll often type 'rm foo', and then remember that foo is a directory, and tack a '-rf' onto the end of it -- except that this rm insists on having its options at the beginning of the command. That is, 'rm -rf foo' works, but 'rm foo -rf' is the equivalent of 'rm foo -- -rf'.
And that's assuming the utilities I want are there. I have tried Fink, but the whole separate/sw tree was confusing, and while it did give me more recent versions of things like Perl, and a few tools OS X didn't have to begin with, it also gave me different, less patched, and sometimes older versions of other binaries. So, should/sw/bin go before/bin, or the other way around? I gave up.
My experience hasn't been that BSD documentation is better, as in both cases, I found myself going to Google anyway.
I hear what you're saying about us not liking it because it's not exactly the same as Linux, but when I see a drop in functionality, and less chance of finding working drivers, or getting software to work, plus it's weird and I have to learn it all over again, I really have to wonder what the upside is.
At least with Linux, there was an increase in functionality to go with the loss of drivers/apps.
Well, take something that came with the computer -- after installing XP from scratch, I DO have to search the web to get a decent video driver. A fresh OS X install on my Powerbook, and I already have one.
Trouble is, how do you know what hardware will "just work" for Windows? Most of it just doesn't, until you pop in the driver CD or download something off the web.
In any case, let me tell you a story. I once boycotted Pepsi, because I couldn't stand the Pepsi girl. One too many "duh"s, and I decided that was it, my caffinated beverage of choice would be Coke. Plus, I had once had a Diet Pepsi, and it was disgusting.
Now that I'm more mature, I did actually try Pepsi, and since it's all going to be the same price and the same amount anyway, I'll take Pepsi over Coke any day. It's usually sweeter, usually has more flavor, the Coke is just sharp and often salty.
I am very, very hard on computers, and I've made my Linux crash a few times, my Windows a few more, and my Mac maybe once or twice. My parents' laptops (running XP Pro) don't sleep or hibernate properly (although they CAN hibernate), and they were purchased more recently than my Powerbook, which sleeps like a baby, and gets rebooted maybe every couple months. I do miss the ability to hibernate, but not much, as the Sleep is so well executed that it can actually sleep for about a solid 2-3 days before it needs to be charged.
But even if you're going to be that petty about the Mac ads, everyone I show them to laughs their ass off, whether it's true or not. You identify with the Mac, which is actually far more civil to the PC than I've seen any PC user be. They're some of the few ads that people actually want to go download and watch for themselves -- most ads you want to skip through and avoid. I'd call that a success.
It really doesn't look like 3DDesktop does the same thing. It looks like 3DDesktop does what I currently use Desktop Manager for under OS X, and forgo the eye candy on Linux and just use Fluxbox.
So what's to stop us from reverse-engineering the hardware and disabling signature checks, or simply stealing the keys?
Personally, I have no problem with requiring an open tool chain. Really, why are compilers still being sold? Make your money with tools like Photoshop, or Lightwave, or whatever other tools are required to make the content. Or use LGPL'd stuff and sell a proprietary library. Or...
People who call the GPL "viral" and such really need a little imagination.
The terrorists really don't care what we're doing at home. "They hate our freedom..." Yeah, BS. They just want us to get out of their own affairs.
I mean, I don't disapprove of using this argument to make people wake up and start caring about our freedoms. I do it too: "This isn't America anymore, it's Oceania. WTF are you fighting for? Regime change starts at home." I strongly believe we should keep our freedoms, live the American dream, and make the Founding Fathers proud -- not rolling in their graves.
Those who would trade essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither.
But let's not kid ourselves. We could really be Oceania and the terrorists still wouldn't have "won", unless we really did decide to pull out -- which we wouldn't, because Oceania needs a perpetual state of war.
emerge mplayer kmplayer firefox kde netscape-flash blackdown-jre blackdown-jdk xine-ui vlc
That should give you everything, free as in beer. It'll boot fast, too, if you tweak a couple of settings -- I know it supports running init scripts in parallel, a nice little feature of having init scripts state their dependencies, instead of a strict order.
The downside is, of course, that you have to wait probably at least one full day for all of this stuff to compile from scratch.
But seriously, Gentoo doesn't seem to have nearly the problems I hear of other distros having with licensing. Is there really such a legal difference between distributing ebuilds (which contain download URLs for the codecs) and distributing the codecs themselves in debs? Could debs include download URLs?
We're talking about Gaim, right? Less than 10 mins of setup on Knoppix.
I'd love to see how you expect ssh+screen to interact with GUIs. Some of us like GUIs. I'm one of them. They're not for everything, but I'd much rather use, say, Firefox in a GUI than lynx.
We're talking about remote control here, so I'm confused as to what Firefox has to do with anything. Unless you're like my dad, and you run rdesktop over a VPN to the desktop at work for absolutely everything, because no one bothered to set up something as simple as, say, IMAP over SSL.
For remote admin, I've never found a GUI that works anywhere near as well as ssh+screen. That doesn't mean I can't also use GUIs for local stuff, though. And I can run a GUI from remote over SSH -- it's called X forwarding.
I want Windows boxes to be able to connect to this.
VNC? And I think there's a Cygwin X for Windows. You should know, seeing as you have Cygwin, right?
OTOH, it seems odd that you'd want that. I never remote to anything from a Windows box -- I treat my Windows boxes as untrusted.
I mean the exact opposite:P I want a bookmark with a duplicate name to overwrite the old one.
Weird. I bet if anyone else cares about this, there will be an extension. Or you could try Opera, or Konqueror, or...
The small reasons to change over ("it's Linux") just aren't enough right now. (Security is important, yes
Yeah, right... You're willing to trade that for a bookmarking feature.
To each his own, but it seems we're at an impasse -- you don't make a compelling reason for why anyone, given the choice, would want Windows. But I can't give you a compelling reason to switch to Linux, unless you can manage to switch off IE -- and then maybe your Windows will be enough anyway.
You run into all kinds of little, annoying things when using Linux, stuff you can't live without from Windows. With me, it's just the opposite. In fact, I'm getting pissed at little things I miss from all three. I miss being able to pop in a game off the shelf and have it just work from Windows. I miss the eye candy, the ability to run off-the-shelf proprietary software but still have reasonable security, and the cmd+left/right for switching between Terminals from OS X. I miss powerful package management, commandline tools, powerful/easy remote admin, and sheer hackability from Linux.
Fortunately, I can dual-boot Linux/Windows and still have Windows for games, and most of these things I miss from other OSes will be in Linux eventually -- I might even do it myself -- whereas what I miss from Linux will likely never be on Windows or OS X in any meaningful way.
Still, security is a big one. You firewall your machine beyond belief. Mine stands naked on the intarweb, and the only work I do for security involves telling my package manager to go update stuff. And a package manager is another big reason for using Linux -- the lack of a good one on OS X is making me want to get a working Linux on my Powerbook, also.
I seem to be busy enough that I can afford to stay behind the curve. This gives me the benefit of only playing the games that actually turned out to be good, and getting to play them on my favorite OS. I still play just as many games as I would anyway, they're just a bit older.
Well, not always. Quake 4 was Linux from just about day 1.
Oops, sorry, I meant, probably wouln't let you quit outright if you don't want the free stuff.
I realize you weren't targeting me. I don't necessarily mean me. I'd encourage those for whom I'm a "geek guy to call" to either detach completely from AOL, or watch their bills very, very closely in case the "free" becomes no longer free.
One big motivator: "I promise I won't force you to learn anything other than Gmail, but if you continue to use AOL for your email, I won't help you when you have problems."
That's it -- for just about everything. Here's another: "Use Firefox or I won't help you with your computer at all. I promise you won't have to replace Firefox for at least the next ten years."
Funny, my original comment was very, very short. Yours is the one that reads like a rant -- even ends with "I wasn't born yesterday." Really, no need to get defensive just yet.
Could we do a distributed timestamping system? Set up a bunch of independent timestamp servers that take a checksum and sign/stamp it, have them all hooked into NTP, so that no one can be corrupted, since you have signatures from enough of them to prove a date in court?
An ethnic group, or any other kind of group, is not an entity. It cannot deserve anything as a whole. Only individuals can.
Well put, and thank you. Shame on me for actually sticking to the argument about races deserving one thing or another -- but I wasn't the one who started that.
The rest of your post was informative, but equally pointless. We can argue all day about how much responsibility my ancestors should get for buying slaves...
No, I'll answer to a bigot in such a way as to expose him as a malicious moron he is.
Better, convert him.
I'm dead serious. Ask questions, make him think, make him squirm, until either he admits he's wrong, or he says something so insanely ridiculous that you have to laugh, like "God says Jews are the Devil!" Or, more likely, he gets so sick of fighting a losing battle that he drops the topic and never brings it up again.
while if I let him get away with it, he'll learn that he can get away with such behavior and has no reason to avoid it in the future.
Ignoring assholes only makes them go on being assholes.
It's selfish of me, but I only care here when the asshole in question is:
Bothering me personally
Amusing to reform (or I'm especially bored)
Less work to reform than it is to be offended.
Although the last one is important. For instance, my college had a weekend-long event welcoming stundents, and it included a short lecture/class/event about racism, sexims, and prejudice in general. They show a skit, in which a clueless girl asks the black man at the table something like "So, are your parents... (insert steriotype)", and he completely flips out. Afterwards, the audience is allowed to question/comment the actors (in character). My question was, why not educate the poor girl? His response: "It's not my job to educate everyone..." My response: "Well, it would actually be less work to just answer the question with 'No, why?'"
Long story short, it can be significantly less work to put people in their place tactfully, and in such a way that they actually may learn something, than it can be to shock them or attack them.
Wait, what? Visual Studio is a game development IDE? Ever try Eclipse?
And excuse me while I flog the dead horse, but Quake 4 runs on the Xbox 360, and also uses OpenGL on the PC, and has a Mac/Linux port. So it can be done, and it can be done well.
A quick Google of RenderWare suggests that it works with OpenGL also, so if you're porting between the PS2 and PC, I'd think they could get the PC version working on GL.
I realize that current mainstream game development is pretty Windows-centric, but I also strongly suspect that your dependence on these tools is hurting you in the short run and in the long run. Case in point: Your tools cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Mine are free. We can both develop games. Am I really so much less productive with Eclipse+Blender+OpenGL+SDL than you are with VisualStudio+CodeWarrior+DirectX that it justifies the kind of money you're spending on your tools, not to mention the cost (visible and invisible) of your OS?
I realize it may not be your choice, but I think of it this way -- my day job, for the moment, is web development. Depending on where I went to work, this might require me to do.NET programming all day long on a Windows box, or I could be playing with my Mac, Linux, and PHP/Ruby. Ultimately, even though I can't necessarily change the way any one company does business, I can choose what company I work for.
I also realize you may not even have that choice...
Let me respond to each of your points, since every other post seems to respond to only one or two:
Flash does behave consistently, where it works. It is not cross-platform, mainly because it's not open. FYI, cross-platform does NOT mean "Windows and Mac". Old versions of Flash work on Linux, and there only on x86 -- Linux runs on many more platforms. And there's more than just Linux that people like to browse from -- pocket devices, Solaris/BSD, and so on.
Being able to turn off components without turning off the whole thing is nice -- I can disable audio, for instance, and not download any sound files at all, but still see some JavaScript animations. Besides, if you look at your list -- you can disable all of Java, or none of it, you can't go halfway. Gee, Java sounds just like Flash, doesn't it? But Java is actually much more cross-platform, and may open up in the future.
Large install base gets you NOWHERE here. IE has a large install base. It's also a steaming pile of shit that everyone who develops for the Web wishes would just go the fuck away. Flash has a large install base, but guess what? It's also a steaming pile of shit that many who develop for and browse the web wishes would just go the fuck away.
Kludges and workarounds... hmm. I call having to install an x86 version of Firefox on amd64 a "kludge". It'll be even more of a kludge to do that under qemu on my Powerbook. But anyway, what about multiple versions of Flash? Keep in mind that the latest flash isn't available everywhere...
And if you don't want kludges and workarounds, use something like Dojo, where everyone else has already thought of the kludges and workarounds and done them for you. That's what Flash does for you in this case, by the way -- they thought of the kludges and workarounds and implemented them, so you don't have to think about it.
Normal embedded mp3 audio can be loaded and played externally. Flash is just duplicating an existing browser tech here.
Video can also be embedded. Flash just makes it annoyingly more difficult to save said video, or to run it fullscreen. It also is orders of magnitude slower than a real video player -- QuickTime, Windows Media Player, VLC, mplayer, any of those. It's the desire to simply stream a video and watch it fullscreen, with nice anti-aliasing, that makes me positively hate the use of Flash in YouTube.
Are you trolling, or do you have a clue? Custom, pre-packaged fonts have been available for browsers for a long time. Not standard, maybe, but you didn't specify that. Plus, I can actually cut'n'paste properly out of something in one of those custom fonts.
Browsers can load/parse/serialize XML. In fact, if you're using standard XHTML, that's what they do all day. Do you not know what AJAX means?
Browsers can POST and GET anything they damn well please. It's called HTML forms. Want to do it automagically? Use it in a hidden frame.
Webcams? Got me. So you're ruining the Internet so that a web page can access my webcam? What the fuck? Just make webcams the domain of normal IM software. Seriously, web pages do NOT need to be doing this, and why do we need to make our own video/IM app?
JavaScript+SVG can programmatically do all that wonderful vector stuff. Since the browser's doing it, it's even conceivable that it could use OpenGL to make it actually, y'know, fast.
Version 8 doesn't run on Linux, but even if it did, why do I care? I can composite PNGs and SVG, at the very least. The rest, I'm not positive about, but I'm pretty damned sure it can be done.
File upload: Got me there. But, two things: 1) Zipfiles. 2) If you're uploading tons of stuff anyway, maybe the browser isn't the right place to do it? Also, why do I need programmatic access to the state of the upload? Why does every Flash app in the world have to have a different progress bar?
JavaScript can animate stuff!!! GIFs are animated too!!!! OMFG, welcome to 1999!!!!!!
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That's what I already do, only perhaps without the keys. Just make an image of the disk with dd in Linux or Disk Utility on OS X, then tell vlc to play dvdnav:///path/to/movie.iso (or movie.cdr, for the mac folk). On Windows, it's not as easy to grab an image, so you can just open the DVD (right-click->explore) and copy all the files to a folder, then tell VLC to play dvdnav:///path/to/movie/dir/
If the pathnames are too long, pretend you're going to open a file, then open /path/to/movie/dir/VIDEO_TS/some_file, then knock VIDEO_TS off the path and make the beginning of it say "dvdnav://".
You lose a tiny bit of polish that way: VLC rarely gets the menus right, and usually just drops you at some random point in the menus. Also, you lose the ability to play it on ordinary DVD players, although I'm sure if I messed around with mencoder options, I could rip the raw video out, not even transcode it, just dump a single title into a new menu/image, and burn it (without CSS) to a stock 4 gig DVD.
But do you see now why they're trying to push Blu-Ray on us? DVD crypto is more broken than Bush's exit strategy.
So why the fuck are they doing a bytecode language?
The rest of your post is equally trollish, but I just thought there was a point to be made there.
The compelling reasons for me are package management, security (firewalls only get you so far), tweakability, and various little things I've gotten used to. The philosophy doesn't hurt, either. These probably do not work well for you, though.
Regarding webcomics: Sounds interesting, I have the same problem, but I hadn't solved it that way. Some webcomics have their own sort of bookmarks -- you can have them set a cookie so you return to that page. I've been bookmarking its homepage and coming back there, so I usually get the most recent comic, then if I haven't checked for awhile, I go back till I find my place. The nice thing about this approach was how "open in tabs" let me check all my webcomics at once, ctrl+w to go to the next one... But once it got to be around 20 or 30, that failed miserably, as it crashes the browser.
But I don't like RSS feeds anyway.
And anyway, someone (maybe me) really should do this extension, because IE is just a bad idea, no matter what your OS.
Regarding installing a small app for remote stuff: One way would be to carry what you need on a CD, another way would be a USB keychain. You could also boot off that USB keychain.
I know this probably doesn't help you at all, but my eventual solution to this problem is just to carry a laptop. It currently runs OS X, so my setup here is Firefox, Thunderbird+IMAP, Adium, TunnelBlick (OpenVPN), the built-in SSH, and if I really need it, Chicken of the VNC. It's also nice for ebooks, movies, and anime. But I can understand not wanting to spend the money -- although I find it very, very odd that my parents don't want to "lug" their Dells home, so they effectively become office desktops...
They aren't my target market, distro makers are. Read this:
In other words, I realize there are other problems to using Gentoo, I'm just pointing out that Gentoo makes it (relatively) easy, but the more user-friendly Linux distros make it damn-near impossible.
And Linspire violating the GPL is better how?
Besides, the Gentoo way of doing this could be duplicated elsewhere, even on an OEM -- force the user to click through some sort of agreement when they boot their computer, which will then download the codecs for them. If they don't click, they don't get the codecs.
I was suggesting that other distros that actually are friendly, like, say, Ubuntu, could take the same approach. I even said that.
Please, Coward, if you ever decide to troll about something again, have just the _slightest_ clue what you're talking about -- and actually reading my post would be nice, too.
Head on over to irc.freenode.net#gentoo, where people will be happy to answer even the most noobish of questions, like "What's a good media player?"
It is more important to have a good community and an OS that actually works than to have an OS that works out of the box.
It exists, but it's not as useful as you'd think. Try the Xine UI, go to preferences, they have settings from "Beginner" to "Master of the Known Universe". And I'm not making it up -- I mean, you actually hit a dropdown, and there is a "Master of the Known Universe" setting.
But once you figure out how to know what you know -- once you figure out how to know which settings you're safe changing, and what they do, and which ones to leave the hell alone -- it's usually easier to stay on "Master of the Known Universe".
What we really need is the kind of truly artful design which is immediately intuitive to beginners, without being limiting to experts. I've seen it done a couple of times...
Ok, stop with the "next" bullshit. This is only the easiest way to install a program because people are trained this way. The easiest way to install a program is to use a package manager -- and no, it doesn't have to be a commandline. It also does help with installing the 3 or 4 different apps, and finding the one that actually works, if you end up having to go through that -- for whatever reason, I don't often have this problem.
I would be very curious to see the results of this. My guesses:
Left entirely on their own, probably OS X beats Kubuntu by a hair.
With people coaching them, obviously it depends on the quality of the coaches, but I suspect it would be between Ubuntu, Gentoo, and OS X. Gentoo has by far the best community to help you, OS X is definitely the easiest to start with, but Ubuntu will probably be both easy to set up and easy to maintain -- OS X becomes a maintenance nightmare without a package manager.
If these people had previously used any computers -- if these were "computer newbies" who had used Windows -- then it'll be XP, but not by as much as you'd think. MS has a way of screwing up their interface, while other people actually improve the interface in other ways than making it like Windows. Besides, KDE and IceWM look quite a bit like Windows.
Or take a bunch of power users from various platforms, study them for awhile to figure out how much experience they had with each platform (how much time do they spend on one platform vs another), then force each of them to use another platform as their desktop OS, exclusively, for some very long time -- a few months or a year. This would probably show which OS is ultimately the most usable. My guess: inconclusive, really. Everyone will find a way to not only live with a given OS, but to thrive on it, and the only thing we'd be able to measure with any reasonable degree of accuracy would be the learning curve. But people don't switch OSes because of a learning curve.
But it would be very interesting, no matter what the results or how trustworthy they were. It would be especially nice if we could find some funding for this from somewhere other than Microsoft.
Unity and coherence smacks of Redmond-like "integration". I understand what you're saying, but I consider it a feature, not a bug, for my software to come from all sorts of different places, tied together by the distro. It means that all software on Linux is third-party, but all the third-party software in the distro is better integrated than anywhere else.
Now, I'm using OS X as a desktop BSD, so this may not reflect other BSDs, but:
I've found that third-party software on OS X doesn't necessarily integrate as well as native. Native software is managed by Software Update, all works together flawlessly, and so on. Third-party software, at least of the commandline sort, is hit or miss, compared with the flawless experience I've had with Linux.
Ubuntu seems to be about the right size for me, but if you really want a good-sized Linux install, you can start with a base Gentoo system or an Ubuntu-server install, then add packages to suit. My OS X didn't exactly come with a package management system to make it easy to add software to the base install.
Source-based is good, and I love Gentoo's ebuild system, but when I'm not creating/tweaking/hacking packages, I get really sick of waiting for every little thing to compile from source. Ubuntu is nice that way -- just download and install. There are other killer features keeping me tied to Gentoo, though, and OS X is certainly not source-based (Software Update is binary), so source-based isn't a deal-breaker for a BSD.
I'm much more familiar with Linux than I am with anything else, so my personal preference leans towards Linux. I'm not picking a fight either, just expressing some views. It does sound like you might like Gentoo, though.
See, I've always had all kinds of annoying little problems with BSD, as seen in OS X. The sound thing you mention is neat, except that sound frequently stops working in Firefox until you open Garage Band and close it, which, for no apparent reason, fixes the problem.
/sw tree was confusing, and while it did give me more recent versions of things like Perl, and a few tools OS X didn't have to begin with, it also gave me different, less patched, and sometimes older versions of other binaries. So, should /sw/bin go before /bin, or the other way around? I gave up.
Commandline utilities generally work, but they're a lot pickier than Linux ones. For instance, I'll often type 'rm foo', and then remember that foo is a directory, and tack a '-rf' onto the end of it -- except that this rm insists on having its options at the beginning of the command. That is, 'rm -rf foo' works, but 'rm foo -rf' is the equivalent of 'rm foo -- -rf'.
And that's assuming the utilities I want are there. I have tried Fink, but the whole separate
My experience hasn't been that BSD documentation is better, as in both cases, I found myself going to Google anyway.
I hear what you're saying about us not liking it because it's not exactly the same as Linux, but when I see a drop in functionality, and less chance of finding working drivers, or getting software to work, plus it's weird and I have to learn it all over again, I really have to wonder what the upside is.
At least with Linux, there was an increase in functionality to go with the loss of drivers/apps.
They dare use atomics?!
Oh, if only we dared...
This is why I make it my personal policy, and would (if I could) make it company policy, to never run Windows on a laptop. It's just a bad idea.
Well, take something that came with the computer -- after installing XP from scratch, I DO have to search the web to get a decent video driver. A fresh OS X install on my Powerbook, and I already have one.
Trouble is, how do you know what hardware will "just work" for Windows? Most of it just doesn't, until you pop in the driver CD or download something off the web.
In any case, let me tell you a story. I once boycotted Pepsi, because I couldn't stand the Pepsi girl. One too many "duh"s, and I decided that was it, my caffinated beverage of choice would be Coke. Plus, I had once had a Diet Pepsi, and it was disgusting.
Now that I'm more mature, I did actually try Pepsi, and since it's all going to be the same price and the same amount anyway, I'll take Pepsi over Coke any day. It's usually sweeter, usually has more flavor, the Coke is just sharp and often salty.
I am very, very hard on computers, and I've made my Linux crash a few times, my Windows a few more, and my Mac maybe once or twice. My parents' laptops (running XP Pro) don't sleep or hibernate properly (although they CAN hibernate), and they were purchased more recently than my Powerbook, which sleeps like a baby, and gets rebooted maybe every couple months. I do miss the ability to hibernate, but not much, as the Sleep is so well executed that it can actually sleep for about a solid 2-3 days before it needs to be charged.
But even if you're going to be that petty about the Mac ads, everyone I show them to laughs their ass off, whether it's true or not. You identify with the Mac, which is actually far more civil to the PC than I've seen any PC user be. They're some of the few ads that people actually want to go download and watch for themselves -- most ads you want to skip through and avoid. I'd call that a success.
It really doesn't look like 3DDesktop does the same thing. It looks like 3DDesktop does what I currently use Desktop Manager for under OS X, and forgo the eye candy on Linux and just use Fluxbox.
So what's to stop us from reverse-engineering the hardware and disabling signature checks, or simply stealing the keys?
Personally, I have no problem with requiring an open tool chain. Really, why are compilers still being sold? Make your money with tools like Photoshop, or Lightwave, or whatever other tools are required to make the content. Or use LGPL'd stuff and sell a proprietary library. Or...
People who call the GPL "viral" and such really need a little imagination.
The terrorists really don't care what we're doing at home. "They hate our freedom..." Yeah, BS. They just want us to get out of their own affairs.
I mean, I don't disapprove of using this argument to make people wake up and start caring about our freedoms. I do it too: "This isn't America anymore, it's Oceania. WTF are you fighting for? Regime change starts at home." I strongly believe we should keep our freedoms, live the American dream, and make the Founding Fathers proud -- not rolling in their graves.
Those who would trade essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither.
But let's not kid ourselves. We could really be Oceania and the terrorists still wouldn't have "won", unless we really did decide to pull out -- which we wouldn't, because Oceania needs a perpetual state of war.
The downside is, of course, that you have to wait probably at least one full day for all of this stuff to compile from scratch.
But seriously, Gentoo doesn't seem to have nearly the problems I hear of other distros having with licensing. Is there really such a legal difference between distributing ebuilds (which contain download URLs for the codecs) and distributing the codecs themselves in debs? Could debs include download URLs?
We're talking about Gaim, right? Less than 10 mins of setup on Knoppix.
We're talking about remote control here, so I'm confused as to what Firefox has to do with anything. Unless you're like my dad, and you run rdesktop over a VPN to the desktop at work for absolutely everything, because no one bothered to set up something as simple as, say, IMAP over SSL.
For remote admin, I've never found a GUI that works anywhere near as well as ssh+screen. That doesn't mean I can't also use GUIs for local stuff, though. And I can run a GUI from remote over SSH -- it's called X forwarding.
VNC? And I think there's a Cygwin X for Windows. You should know, seeing as you have Cygwin, right?
OTOH, it seems odd that you'd want that. I never remote to anything from a Windows box -- I treat my Windows boxes as untrusted.
Weird. I bet if anyone else cares about this, there will be an extension. Or you could try Opera, or Konqueror, or...
Yeah, right... You're willing to trade that for a bookmarking feature.
To each his own, but it seems we're at an impasse -- you don't make a compelling reason for why anyone, given the choice, would want Windows. But I can't give you a compelling reason to switch to Linux, unless you can manage to switch off IE -- and then maybe your Windows will be enough anyway.
You run into all kinds of little, annoying things when using Linux, stuff you can't live without from Windows. With me, it's just the opposite. In fact, I'm getting pissed at little things I miss from all three. I miss being able to pop in a game off the shelf and have it just work from Windows. I miss the eye candy, the ability to run off-the-shelf proprietary software but still have reasonable security, and the cmd+left/right for switching between Terminals from OS X. I miss powerful package management, commandline tools, powerful/easy remote admin, and sheer hackability from Linux.
Fortunately, I can dual-boot Linux/Windows and still have Windows for games, and most of these things I miss from other OSes will be in Linux eventually -- I might even do it myself -- whereas what I miss from Linux will likely never be on Windows or OS X in any meaningful way.
Still, security is a big one. You firewall your machine beyond belief. Mine stands naked on the intarweb, and the only work I do for security involves telling my package manager to go update stuff. And a package manager is another big reason for using Linux -- the lack of a good one on OS X is making me want to get a working Linux on my Powerbook, also.
I seem to be busy enough that I can afford to stay behind the curve. This gives me the benefit of only playing the games that actually turned out to be good, and getting to play them on my favorite OS. I still play just as many games as I would anyway, they're just a bit older.
Well, not always. Quake 4 was Linux from just about day 1.
Oops, sorry, I meant, probably wouln't let you quit outright if you don't want the free stuff.
I realize you weren't targeting me. I don't necessarily mean me. I'd encourage those for whom I'm a "geek guy to call" to either detach completely from AOL, or watch their bills very, very closely in case the "free" becomes no longer free.
One big motivator: "I promise I won't force you to learn anything other than Gmail, but if you continue to use AOL for your email, I won't help you when you have problems."
That's it -- for just about everything. Here's another: "Use Firefox or I won't help you with your computer at all. I promise you won't have to replace Firefox for at least the next ten years."
Funny, my original comment was very, very short. Yours is the one that reads like a rant -- even ends with "I wasn't born yesterday." Really, no need to get defensive just yet.
Could we do a distributed timestamping system? Set up a bunch of independent timestamp servers that take a checksum and sign/stamp it, have them all hooked into NTP, so that no one can be corrupted, since you have signatures from enough of them to prove a date in court?
Well put, and thank you. Shame on me for actually sticking to the argument about races deserving one thing or another -- but I wasn't the one who started that.
The rest of your post was informative, but equally pointless. We can argue all day about how much responsibility my ancestors should get for buying slaves...
Better, convert him.
I'm dead serious. Ask questions, make him think, make him squirm, until either he admits he's wrong, or he says something so insanely ridiculous that you have to laugh, like "God says Jews are the Devil!" Or, more likely, he gets so sick of fighting a losing battle that he drops the topic and never brings it up again.
It's selfish of me, but I only care here when the asshole in question is:
Although the last one is important. For instance, my college had a weekend-long event welcoming stundents, and it included a short lecture/class/event about racism, sexims, and prejudice in general. They show a skit, in which a clueless girl asks the black man at the table something like "So, are your parents... (insert steriotype)", and he completely flips out. Afterwards, the audience is allowed to question/comment the actors (in character). My question was, why not educate the poor girl? His response: "It's not my job to educate everyone..." My response: "Well, it would actually be less work to just answer the question with 'No, why?'"
Long story short, it can be significantly less work to put people in their place tactfully, and in such a way that they actually may learn something, than it can be to shock them or attack them.
Wait, what? Visual Studio is a game development IDE? Ever try Eclipse?
.NET programming all day long on a Windows box, or I could be playing with my Mac, Linux, and PHP/Ruby. Ultimately, even though I can't necessarily change the way any one company does business, I can choose what company I work for.
And excuse me while I flog the dead horse, but Quake 4 runs on the Xbox 360, and also uses OpenGL on the PC, and has a Mac/Linux port. So it can be done, and it can be done well.
A quick Google of RenderWare suggests that it works with OpenGL also, so if you're porting between the PS2 and PC, I'd think they could get the PC version working on GL.
I realize that current mainstream game development is pretty Windows-centric, but I also strongly suspect that your dependence on these tools is hurting you in the short run and in the long run. Case in point: Your tools cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Mine are free. We can both develop games. Am I really so much less productive with Eclipse+Blender+OpenGL+SDL than you are with VisualStudio+CodeWarrior+DirectX that it justifies the kind of money you're spending on your tools, not to mention the cost (visible and invisible) of your OS?
I realize it may not be your choice, but I think of it this way -- my day job, for the moment, is web development. Depending on where I went to work, this might require me to do
I also realize you may not even have that choice...
Let me respond to each of your points, since every other post seems to respond to only one or two:
Flash does behave consistently, where it works. It is not cross-platform, mainly because it's not open. FYI, cross-platform does NOT mean "Windows and Mac". Old versions of Flash work on Linux, and there only on x86 -- Linux runs on many more platforms. And there's more than just Linux that people like to browse from -- pocket devices, Solaris/BSD, and so on.
Being able to turn off components without turning off the whole thing is nice -- I can disable audio, for instance, and not download any sound files at all, but still see some JavaScript animations. Besides, if you look at your list -- you can disable all of Java, or none of it, you can't go halfway. Gee, Java sounds just like Flash, doesn't it? But Java is actually much more cross-platform, and may open up in the future.
Large install base gets you NOWHERE here. IE has a large install base. It's also a steaming pile of shit that everyone who develops for the Web wishes would just go the fuck away. Flash has a large install base, but guess what? It's also a steaming pile of shit that many who develop for and browse the web wishes would just go the fuck away.
Kludges and workarounds... hmm. I call having to install an x86 version of Firefox on amd64 a "kludge". It'll be even more of a kludge to do that under qemu on my Powerbook. But anyway, what about multiple versions of Flash? Keep in mind that the latest flash isn't available everywhere...
And if you don't want kludges and workarounds, use something like Dojo, where everyone else has already thought of the kludges and workarounds and done them for you. That's what Flash does for you in this case, by the way -- they thought of the kludges and workarounds and implemented them, so you don't have to think about it.
Normal embedded mp3 audio can be loaded and played externally. Flash is just duplicating an existing browser tech here.
Video can also be embedded. Flash just makes it annoyingly more difficult to save said video, or to run it fullscreen. It also is orders of magnitude slower than a real video player -- QuickTime, Windows Media Player, VLC, mplayer, any of those. It's the desire to simply stream a video and watch it fullscreen, with nice anti-aliasing, that makes me positively hate the use of Flash in YouTube.
Are you trolling, or do you have a clue? Custom, pre-packaged fonts have been available for browsers for a long time. Not standard, maybe, but you didn't specify that. Plus, I can actually cut'n'paste properly out of something in one of those custom fonts.
Browsers can load/parse/serialize XML. In fact, if you're using standard XHTML, that's what they do all day. Do you not know what AJAX means?
Browsers can POST and GET anything they damn well please. It's called HTML forms. Want to do it automagically? Use it in a hidden frame.
Webcams? Got me. So you're ruining the Internet so that a web page can access my webcam? What the fuck? Just make webcams the domain of normal IM software. Seriously, web pages do NOT need to be doing this, and why do we need to make our own video/IM app?
JavaScript+SVG can programmatically do all that wonderful vector stuff. Since the browser's doing it, it's even conceivable that it could use OpenGL to make it actually, y'know, fast.
Version 8 doesn't run on Linux, but even if it did, why do I care? I can composite PNGs and SVG, at the very least. The rest, I'm not positive about, but I'm pretty damned sure it can be done.
File upload: Got me there. But, two things: 1) Zipfiles. 2) If you're uploading tons of stuff anyway, maybe the browser isn't the right place to do it? Also, why do I need programmatic access to the state of the upload? Why does every Flash app in the world have to have a different progress bar?
JavaScript can animate stuff!!! GIFs are animated too!!!! OMFG, welcome to 1999!!!!!!
Flash is